I’m discovering, in the evolution of these writings, that I am also in a sense changing the way that I see the world and changing the way that I choose to use language. A couple of months ago I lamented the passivity that seems to be inherent in the word “nature”. As I wrote last week’s interlude on visualizing planetary motions I struggled with what to call the planets. A four-billion-year-old, seven-septillion-ton mass of living embodied energy is clearly not an “it”, and so I went with the human convention of Venus as feminine, Mars as masculine, etc., which admittedly felt a bit arbitrary.
The English language is unfortunate in many ways, a notable one of which is lacking a gender-neutral third-person personal pronoun. Thus all that we accord the status of beinghood must be either a “he” or a “she”, or the awkward “s/he”. This is a strange artifact of history in an otherwise mostly gender-free language. We do not have masculine or feminine nouns, or verbs, or “the”, or “I”, or “you”, and a group of ladies or a collection of dudes are equally “they”, and yet somehow when we speak of each other individually we must select a gender.
Humans who reject the gender binary have largely settled on “they”. While I respect that choice and will gladly refer to anyone by the pronouns they choose, I find the word wanting. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel it is helpful to be able to distinguish a single being from a multiple of beings. “They” is also a self-exclusive plural - the opposite of “we” or “us” and one frequently used in tribal otherings and battles. And it is often impersonal, being also the plural of “it.” “They” can refer to a group of people or a grove of trees but also to a stack of books or a collection of ideas.
Robin Wall Kimmerer confronted this dilemma and suggested “ki”, with a plural of “kin”, as a pronoun for plants and birds and rivers. I thought about trying this out, but it does not quite resonate with me. The hard “k” sound fails to flow off the tongue, and “key” is already a word, as is “kin”. That said, if “ki” and “kin” should find wider use, I will gladly adopt them.
If I ask myself what pronoun I might choose, the one that comes to mind is “che”, pronounced chee. Still soft enough to flow, and close to “he” or “she” yet distinct. And it is phonetically identical to the Chinese qi, which refers to the life force which animates the universe and all living beings - precisely that which might properly distinguish a “che” (or a “he” or a “she”) from an “it”. Even so, casually using “che” in writing - raising question marks and alarm bells in readers’ minds - would seem a radical act.
I’d like to encourage more conversation in the comments on these posts, so I’ll ask you: what pronoun feels right to you for maples and mountains and moons? Shall we use “they”, or intuitively discern/arbitrarily assign a gender, or create a new word? Is this gendered pronoun business less of an issue in other languages?
The lack of a proper gender-neutral personal pronoun in English is a major shortcoming, for sure. I don't have a good solution for how we should refer to our nonhuman kin, but I'd like to share how my view of the use of singular "they" has shifted. When some of my peers from college began using "they/them" pronouns I found it incredibly awkward and confusing in conversation, as well as feeling impersonal ("they" is what you say when you don't know exactly who it is you're referring to). But, as more people have started adopting these pronouns, it has gradually become easier and more natural to parse conversations using them, and I think that trend will continue as the language evolves. And then, a while back, I heard someone being interviewed on television talking about their non-binary friend, saying "they are such a wonderful person..." And suddenly I heard "they" completely differently - not as an awkward, impersonal stand-in for a missing, better word, but as pronoun for containing multitudes, being both-and.
He is.
She is.
They are.
It's kind of beautiful if you think of it that way.
I enjoy this question you posed. It seems important to consider but also unlikely for one person to change cultural language except in their circle. From that point of view it seems wise to use whatever word feels best to you. Since words are so cumbersome the intention is what matters most. That's why I like how you ended with the question about intuiting a gender because it implies us each honoring our direct connection with nature, at least until everyone agrees. Why do we all need to agree on the pronoun for a river if we are agreeing that it is alive and kin to us? Perhaps that shared love is enough to allow us to see past the words that were chosen and see that we are both honoring the relationship through our hearts. I love how we can refer to the earth as our mother and so no pronoun is needed but she still makes sense if you have to use one Then can we call a river or tree a brother or sister from the same mother? Family is another non gendered way of saying kin. Fam? He, she, we, tree? Maybe tree can be an all inclusive pronoun since it rhymes and can represent nature.